Archive for April, 2011

  • 29 Apr

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    A writerly grab bag of SFR news

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    Haven’t had one of these in a while!

    The Seeing Stars anthology will be coming out on 9 May. There will be a giveaway at The Galaxy Express on the 9th so please direct your browsers there if you wish to win a digital copy of the anthology. There are five other very talented authors in the antho so, if you like SFR, I’m sure you’ll like the book. If you’d like to read a few more details about each of the stories, please go here.

    If you miss out on the giveaway, a group of four of us are also having a Seeing Stars Scavenger Hunt from the 9th to 15th of May. Up for grabs is a digital package of the following:

    • the full Seeing Stars anthology, thanks to Sophie Angerming
    • the full Master Me anthology, thanks to Justine Elyot
    • a copy of “Truce of Trust” from Lisabet Sarai
    • a copy of “A Pirate’s Passion” from me

    I’ll be posting more details of this Scavenger Hunt next week.

    In keeping with my regular practice of putting it all out there (ahem), the first full chapter of Europa Europa is now available at my main website for your reading pleasure. The product page contains the background of the novella as well.

    I am restarting my bi-monthly newsletter in June. If you’d like to climb aboard, please head along to the sign-up page. (It’s a two-step process powered by MailChimp, just to make sure you really truly ruly want to read my rantings.)

    And I’m self-publishing! A novel! Space opera with romantic elements might be the best way to put it. Sign up for the newsletter to get first news of it. (Sneaky, aren’t I?)

    Also, in a break with tradition, there will be lots of posts next week in advance of Seeing Stars’ release:

    • Lisabet Sarai will be here on Tuesday
    • I’ll be at Lisabet’s blog on Wednesday
    • I’ll be at Justine Elyot‘s blog on Thursday
    • Justine will be here on Friday

    And I’ll be posting something short and completely off tangent on Monday.

    Think that’s it. Have a good weekend.

  • 27 Apr

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    Why I don’t like clouds

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    So one of Amazon’s territories went down for a substantial amount of time last week. This isn’t the first time that’s happened.

    I don’t like clouds. I have accounts with a few cloud backup services but I only use them when I can’t get to my usual concrete resources. But the reason I don’t like The Cloud isn’t to do with the fact that I don’t run a hot little start-up or that I can’t afford to spread my business across several cloud providers and/or time-zones. I don’t like clouds because I don’t like eavesdropping layers between me and my private data.

    Private data. It’s bad enough that so much of our personal details are no longer private. You would have heard about Apple collecting location information on its users but it’s not the only violator. Google do it too. Then, to add salt to the paper cut, popular cloud back-up service, Dropbox, recently amended their Terms of Service to say the following:

    As set forth in our privacy policy, and in compliance with United States law, Dropbox cooperates with United States law enforcement when it receives valid legal process, which may require Dropbox to provide the contents of your private Dropbox. In these cases, Dropbox will remove Dropbox’s encryption from the files before providing them to law enforcement.

    The old adage of “if you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to be worried about” is well and truly beaten to a pulp by that career Roman Catholic, Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu, who said in those racey days of the early 1600s:

    If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

    Reference too old for you? How about Professor James Duane on why you should never talk to the police.

    So, coming back to one’s data, I hate that a foreign government has access to my private information. Lest we forget, the US government has a long and cosy history with its corporations. Some standout moments include:

    • Overthrowing the elected government of Guatemala on behalf of the United Fruit Company (here, here and here for official documents).
    • Project ECHELON that eavesdrops mostly on non-military targets across the world; i.e. governments, organisations and businesses. This is an ongoing initiative and there have been a few spats over the decades about how the USA has used information gathered by ECHELON in Western Europe to give US corporations competitive advantages.
    • Derailing open-source in Vietnam
    • Quantitative Easing

    A lot of collusion dates back to way before the interconnected Web 2.0 world that we now live in. But of course we don’t even have to consider the US government to talk about corporate collusion. Both Google and Yahoo! have collaborated with foreign national governments and Blackberry will too if it hopes to continue doing business in the Middle East.

    With all these interested government queries, software back doors, location polling and decryption-on-demand, is it any wonder that I’m nervous about (a) where my data is being stored by all these magnanimous corporations (Gmail, Dropbox, Apple, Yahoo!, Android, Facebook, Twitter, ad nauseam) and (b) how long for?

    So what’s the answer?

    First, open-source software. Microsoft isn’t open. Neither is Android. Neither is Chrome. And, despite what the fanbois may tell you, neither is Apple. The only open-source operating system software in the world is Linux. Proper Linux, not its partly-closed variants as developed by Google and Apple.

    Tangible back-up resources. I use a combination of my other computers, USB sticks, SD cards and external hard disk drives to back up my data. When stuck, I will use the cloud, but I’m sure to delete my stuff off there as soon as possible. (Not that that’s a guarantee. Who knows which governments are slurping the data even as I upload them?)

    If you use the cloud and decide to delete the more private files, remember to delete the server versions as well.

    If you have to use the cloud to store data, use your own encryption before uploading. Never ever depend on cloud encryption.

    And educate yourself a little. I know those EULAs are a pain but you’re not going to learn anything if you don’t read them. And it’s no use clicking past all those windows only to declare, a year or so later, that “I didn’t know!”. If the computer is a big part of your working life (as it is mine), it behooves you to know as much about that world as you do about your own immediate reality. Because, let’s face it, in this world, your computer IS your reality.

    It’s ten o’clock in the morning. Do you know where your data are?

  • 22 Apr

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    Movie review: The Last Dragon

    5

    Oh I was so prepared to love this movie. Chinese landscapes? Joint Australian-Chinese production? Sam Neill? Win win win. Er, not so fast.

    The Last Dragon follows a singular adventure of Josh (Louis Corbett) and Ling (Li Lin Jing), in China during school vacation and spending time with their respective parents, Dr Chris Chase (Sam Neill) and Dr Li (Wang Ji). It is in China that Ling discovers she can hear flute music that nobody else can hear. She is, of course, The Chosen One, and must recover the mystical pearl, the essence of a dragon’s power, lost for three thousand years, and restore it to the dragon now residing beneath the site of the archaeological dig.

    When I saw Australian involvement in this film, I was expecting great things. Mad Max; Children of the Revolution; Death in Brunswick; The Dish. While I yawn and forget the latest Hollywood blockbuster, these Aussie films remain with me as quirky, surreal glances into other lives and I love each and every one of them. The Last Dragon, however, starts with cliche and goes downhill from there.

    Of course one of the kids is The Chosen One. Of course the other one is a hidden genius in another way. They meet the caretaker of the temple (Wu Dong, played competently by Jordan Chan) who is both guide, comedy relief and, of course, martial arts kick-ass guy. After all, he’s Chinese. They also meet the dragon, who seems to like posturing in mid-air more than actually saving the kids during the climax of the film. However, the dragon is good and that is evident the first time you see it. How? Well, all the good dragons have stubby snouts. Haven’t you noticed? The ones with the long, more interesting, less puppy-like profiles, are heinous fire-breathers and although it is stressed to us in this movie that Chinese dragons are not like Western dragons At All…they are when it comes to cliche-ville.

    Other discordant notes include the fact that Sam Neill’s character is divorced. A lot is made of this at the beginning of the movie—it’s the reason for father and son evidently not seeing each other for a while—but it’s not carried through. Why are the parents divorced? We never know. Is it even necessary for the parents to be divorced? Not at all, especially when there’s not a hint of romance between Dr Chase (Josh’s dad) and Dr Li (Ling’s mum). It’s like someone sat down with a blank piece of paper and thought of as many stereotypes they could write down before starting on the script. Divorced parents? Check. Smart-arse son? Check. “Aaaawww” moment connected to ex-wife’s birthday? Check. Mysterious book? Check. Intricate locking mechanism to a stone door involving a carving? Check. Machinery that requires split-second timing and some biological oddities in order to be activated? Check.

    We find out that the pearl’s disappearance is somehow associated with a dying emperor, but the grieving daughter’s actions are also completely implausible. I swear the dragon is sporting four claws in some drawings and five in others. (It’s important.) And the editor had a strange sense of timing, chopping up important scenes yet keeping irrelevant footage running for way too long. (The first time the kids are in the cave, for example.) I think I’ll stop there before I run through the entire movie.

    It wasn’t a complete bust though. The leader of the archaeological dig? A woman, and a capable yet empathetic character she is too. I liked Dr Li a lot. The kids could be swapped for any other Asian/white pair of characters. Sam Neill…well, he didn’t stretch himself but I considered him my eye-candy for this movie, so I’ll give him a pass. Jordan Chan had his moments but got a bit repetitive from time to time.

    The other thing I noted was that the villain, a lying geophysicist who was in conflict with both of the other academics, was American. I wonder, with the USA’s declining power, whether we’ll start to see more foreign movies with American villains? It made a nice change.

    I have read that the movie was shot entirely at the Hengdian World Studios, south of Shanghai. The studio is reputedly the largest studio complex in the world with over 3 million square metres of built sets. Guys, it doesn’t matter. You can have a studio on the Moon but, unless you have a good script to go with your CGI and (questionable) wire work, you’re not going to have a memorable film. I thought the Australian influence would work its magic in this regard, but I was obviously wrong.

    When all’s said and done, however, this was a kids’ film with kid film sensibilities. With that in mind, I should tell you that Little Dinosaur rated this 9/10. More world-weary eleven year old that he is, The Wast grimaced and rated it at 7½/10.

    MY VERDICT: Standard B-grade kid flick. Unfortunately. 6/10.

  • 20 Apr

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    On the twisted morality of morals

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    A couple of weeks ago, I told you about a tale Little Dinosaur was tackling in English. It appears that there are tales of the honest woodcutter all over the world and the moral seems to be pretty well established. That is, “speak the truth and you will be happy”.

    Except, that’s not what the moral is at all, is it? The real moral of the story is: “tell the truth and you’ll become rich”. After all, the reward for being honest is not a sense of self-satisfaction, a glow knowing that you have done the right thing. No, not at all. The reward is something very expensive; a material possession.

    It got me thinking. Is this really what I want to tell my children? Be honest because you could GET MONEY if you do? I much prefer: be honest because it’s the right thing to do and you’ll be able to look yourself in the mirror without flinching.

    I understand that, when these fairy tales were first created, they were for illiterate peasants who couldn’t think beyond the next day’s meal. But I had thought that our moral sense may have progressed, if not in lock-step then certainly staggeringly a little further beyond a bag/axe/crown/fish of gold being the answer to all our problems. Why are these old tales so persistent?

    And here’s the second problem I have with fairy tales such as the one we studied. It’s all about being happy with your lot. Don’t try to rise above your poor beginnings. Just be happy to tootle along and sometime, in the future, if you’re lucky, a deity may throw you some scraps and you’ll be just like all the aristocrats you envy without going to any effort at all. To my mind, there’s a hidden thread of instructive fatalism in there. Don’t argue, don’t fight, don’t learn. Just keep doing what you’re doing and, one day, who knows? You’ll win the lottery! Or win the prince! (Cinderella) Or you may not, but them’s the breaks, know what I mean? * wink wink * nudge nudge *.

    I feel the same way about the Sermon on the Mount. I personally think that was added in later to keep the proles happy while various Christian-based empires lorded it over them. From all I’ve read, Christ (if he existed) was a real rabble-rouser and completely the opposite to the one who preached the joys of being utterly passive.

  • 18 Apr

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    It’s true, I’ve been a slacker

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    Here’s the conundrum for your pedestrian author. On the one hand, we’re told to keep up with all our social media duties…blog, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, the list goes on and on. And, on the other hand, we’re told to keep writing.

    It’s all very well to say, well devote an hour a day to your social media duties and write your next book the rest of the time, but that’s not how it works. When I’m waist-deep in writing a story, the last thing I think of is social media.

    Moreover, the change from creative writing to marketing writing is a significant wrench and, when I’m on a roll, I just don’t do it. In fact, when I’m on a creative writing kick, I hardly think of eating, much less broadcasting some pithy and witty tweet.

    So I’ll be honest and tell you that, given a choice, I’ll punt for creative writing every time because, in the long run, I believe that will pay off for me more than the marketing writing. That’s not to say that marketing writing isn’t important, but it’s no use marketing if you haven’t got anything to market, right?

    But all of this doesn’t answer the basic question of why I’ve been a slacker. Well, I’ve been working on a new paranormal series under a different pen-name. (More on that later.) I’m also editing a story for an upcoming Halloween anthology. And I’m editing an old novel to publish. And if you think all that, plus homeschooling the kids and doing my other wifely and motherly duties, means I haven’t got enough hours in a day, you’d be entirely correct.

    I’m hoping I’ll have something new to share with you this week but I’m really on a roll here and I don’t want to have to switch to another track when this one is going so well. Hope you understand.

  • 06 Apr

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    Morals and where to find them

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    Little Dinosaur and I were tackling a tale recently in English. Here it is:

    Lu Tong was a poor woodcutter who only owned one axe. Every day, he went into the woord to cut tree branches to sell.

    One day, after he had cut enough wood, he went to a stream to get a drink. He tucked his axe into his waistband, squatted on the bank and bent over to scoop up some water. His axe slipped out and dropped into the water.

    Hearing sounds of Lu Tong’s distress when this happened, a fish came to the surface, asking why Lu Tong was crying. When Lu Tong told him, the fish dived down and brought up a golden axe.

    “Is this yours?”

    Lu Tong shook his head.

    The fish dived again and returned with an old axe. “Is this one yours?”

    Lu Tong was delighted to see it. He shouted, “That is my axe!”.

    The fish gave the axe to him. Then it surprised Lu Tong by giving him the golden axe too.

    There was a comprehension test following this tale (I truncated it for your reading relief) and it included asking what the moral of the story was. And Little Dinosaur replied: “Don’t drink from a stream.”

    Ah, the practicalities of the young mind.